April 26--San Gimignano and Siena

Before we hit the big city (Siena...which after a few days of recovering, we were ready to tackle again), we drove a few miles down the road to see a church called Sant'Antimo. Behind the church, live monks and when we got there they were singing mass. We sat quietly in the back of the church to listen for a while and then snuck back out again. The church was built in the 800's and a few days later we would go back there to first take a hike and then attend a concert.


We overshot Siena by about 20 km to visit San Gimignano, another hill town, about which we had heard a lot. We were pretty unimpressed and found it to be a lot more tourist focused and expensive than the other hill towns we had visited. The spectacular thing about San Gimignano is that it has five of it's original towers still standing. Here is a picture of some of the towers. Very exciting:


Moving on to Siena...despite our inability to get OUT of Siena, getting into Siena was very easy and we also got lucky and found free parking right outside of the fortrezza, which is HUGE and star shaped. Despite our best efforts, we couldn't penetrate the fortezza:


...so we headed into the town centro.

We spent some time people watching in the Piazza Del Campo, which is a large square surrounded by restaurants and cafes. We watched as people slowly moved across the piazza, following the sun.

In Italy, large groups of seniors get together to talk on benches. These old people were trying to block the sun from their eyes with newspapers (not trying to avoid having their picture taken):

Even macho guys eat gelato:

And the rat tail has made a huge comeback in Italy (although we saw many rat tails that were more prominent than this one):


Sylish mullets are all the rage, too (kudos to Jason W who has been leading this trend in the Dallas/Fort Worth are).

Siena's Duomo was pretty overpriced, we thought, so we just took some pictures outside of it. Here is Jim on the steps. It is a huge place.



We couldn't help but take advantage of this photo opportunity. Jim got his saint on (apologies in advance to all of the Catholics!):

After wandering around Siena, doing a little shopping, and eating some more gelato, we went to dinner in a very cool restaurant. Unfortunately, our camera ran out of batteries before we got to the restaurant, but it was like eating in a cave, underground. The food was delicious and, fat and happy, we waddled back to our car and promptly got lost trying to get out of Siena. Sigh.